Raycast raises $30M Series B to reduce context switching

Productivity software company Raycast has raised a $30 million Series B funding round to reduce workplace context switching and improve focus. This brings the company's funding to over $45 million.

The proliferation of software tools — meant to increase productivity and simplify lives — is, in fact, making work increasingly complex and fragmented. 

Knowledge workers constantly switch contexts between workflows and tools, leading to mental overload and significant productivity loss. A 2022 Harvard Business Review (HBR) study of mid and back-office workers at Fortune 500 companies found that the “cost” of each context switch is about two seconds, with the average user toggling between different apps and websites nearly 1,200 times daily. 

Over a year, this “toggle tax” added up to five working weeks or 9 per cent of annual time — lost time that damages productivity and makes it hard to keep focus.

Raycast has been built to combat this digital fragmentation and help people achieve 'Flow'. 

Acting as the ultimate shortcut to everything, its platform allows users to interact with different apps without fully switching contexts, enabling them to maintain a state of productive flow. 

Over 1500 open-source extensions are available to users to make the most of apps like GitHub, Zoom and Notion without losing track of their thoughts.

Thomas Paul Mann, CEO and co-founder of Raycast, said:

“Our mission in founding Raycast was to redefine how people interact with their computers. We believe that achieving a state of 'flow' is key to productivity and job satisfaction. 

Raycast isn't just about saving time — it's about never wasting it. By allowing users to  perform actions like sending Slack messages, checking notifications, or anything else without even opening the app, we're helping people stay focused and in control of their digital environment.”

Since its launch in 2020, Raycast has become the go-to tool for software engineers, product developers and designers, building a 22k-strong community of developers who use and build on the tool. In total, Raycast has hundreds of thousands of daily active users for its Mac capabilities.

The company is also launching upcoming iOS and Windows versions soon.

Atomico led the round, alongside participation from Accel, Coatue, Y Combinator, Atlassian Ventures, World Innovation Lab and notable angels Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel), Thomas Dohmke (CEO of GitHub) and Tobi Lütke (CEO of Shopify). As part of this round, Atomico Partner Luca Eisenstecken will join Raycast’s board.

Luca Eisenstecken, Partner at Atomico, added:

“Thomas and Petr have built an incredible product that solves a crucial problem not only beautifully, but also effectively with a thriving open-source community of developers at its heart.

Raycast provides users with virtually limitless opportunities to build a highly personalised productivity platform tailored to their unique workflows. 

I personally find it indispensable for my daily work. This is further underscored by the remarkable results of our in-depth user research during due diligence, where a staggering 98 per cent of respondents reported a significant increase in their Raycast usage over the past six months.”

Raycast’s platform integrates seamlessly with third-party extensions like Jira, GitHub, and Notion, alongside other commonly used applications such as Translate, Spotify, Linear, Google Translate, YouTube, and ChatGPT. Raycast’s community of 22,000 developers has built many of these integrations.

Additionally, Raycast Pro, its AI-enhanced tool acts as a singular AI that will  interact with all a user’s tools in natural language, and allow them to create and reuse their own AI prompts, further enhancing the flow state by reducing the need to context switch even for AI interactions. 

The funding is being used to invest in Raycast’s cross-platform vision, starting with product development in Windows and iOS and redefining productivity with AI. This will include a number of key European hires across engineering, product, and UX specialists in these platforms.

Lead image: Raycast founders, Thomas Paul Mann and Petr Nikolaev. Photo: uncredited.